Jackson Jambalaya

 If there is one thing unreconstructed Southerners love to do it is to refight the Civil War (War of Northern Aggression for them).   Defending the Lost Cause myth, they often sound as Germans claiming they were backstabbed at home in World War I.  Dr. David Williams, an award-winning historian at Valdosta State University, takes square aim at the myth.  He discusses in a 2013 paper how many Southerners rebelled against the Confederacy, often calling it a "rich man's war, a poor man's fight."  Dr. Williams asserts:  

In 1863, as battles raged on distant fields, a newspaper editor in the central Georgia town of Milledgeville was more concerned about the war at home. In an essay discussing the many ways in which Southerners were working against the Confederacy, the editor wrote: “We are fighting each other harder than we ever fought the enemy.”....

Between 1861 and 1865, the South was torn apart by a violent inner civil war, a war no less significant to the Confederacy’s fate than its more widely known struggle against the Yankees. 

From its beginnings the Confederacy suffered from a rising tide of intense domestic hostility, not only among Southern blacks but increasingly among Southern whites. Ironically, it was a hostility brought on largely by those most responsible for the Confederacy’s creation. Planters excused themselves from the draft in various ways, then grew far too much cotton and tobacco, and not nearly enough food. Soldiers went hungry, as did their families back home. Women defied Confederate authorities by staging food riots from Richmond, Virginia, to Galveston, Texas. Soldiers deserted by the tens of thousands, and draft evasion became commonplace. By 1864, the draft law was practically impossible to enforce and two-thirds of the Confederate army was absent with or without leave. Many deserters and draft dodgers formed armed bands that controlled vast areas of the Southern countryside.

Wartime disaffection among Southerners had solid roots in the early secession crisis. Most white Southerners, three-fourths of whom owned no slaves, made it clear in the winter 1860-61 elections for state convention delegates that they opposed immediate secession. Nevertheless, state conventions across the South, all of them dominated by slaveholders, ultimately ignored majority will and took their states out of the Union. A staunch South Carolina secessionist admitted the same. “But,” he asked, “whoever waited for the common people when a great move was to be made—we must make the move and force them to follow.”...

In the spring of 1862, a southwest Georgia man wrote to Governor Joe Brown about planters growing too much cotton, begging him to “stop those internal enemies of the country, for they will whip us sooner than all Lincolndom combined could do it.” Thousands of planters and merchants defied the Confederacy’s cotton export policy and smuggled it out by the ton. Most states passed laws limiting production of non-food items, but enforcement was lax. With prices on the rise, cotton producers and dealers were getting richer than ever. Some bragged openly that the longer the war went on the more money they made.

The inevitable result of cotton and tobacco over-production was a severe food shortage that hit soldiers’ families especially hard. With their husbands and fathers at the front and impressment officers confiscating what little food they had, it was difficult for soldiers’ wives to provide for themselves and their children. Planters had promised to keep soldiers’ families fed, but they never grew enough food to meet the need. Much of what food they did produce was sold to speculators, who hoarded it or priced it far beyond the reach of most ordinary people.  (KF: Shades of what happened to Germany in the Great War.  Britain ensured the farms had enough workers to ensure the crops were harvested while the idiot Germans drafted all farm workers into the army.  Blockade plus worker shortage meant starvation for the army and country. )

In an open letter to the Savannah Morning News, one enraged Georgian was sure where the blame lay: “The crime is with the planters . . . as a class, they have yielded their patriotism, if they ever had any, to covetousness . . . for the sake of money, they are pursuing a course to destroy or demoralize our army—to starve out the other class dependent on them for provisions.”

Desertion became so serious by the summer of 1863 that Jefferson Davis begged absentees to return. If only they would, he insisted, the Confederacy could match Union armies man for man. But they did not return......

Bands of deserters also ranged over southern Mississippi’s Simpson County. When the sheriff arrested several of them, their friends broke them out of jail. That entire area of Mississippi was, in fact, largely controlled by deserters and resisters who killed or drove off anyone connected with the Confederacy. In spring 1864 Major James Hamilton, quartermaster for taxation in Mississippi, wrote to his superiors that in the state’s Seventh District, covering most of southern Mississippi, deserters had “overrun and taken possession of the country.” Hamilton’s agent in Jones County had been driven off, and Hamilton had heard nothing more from him. In Covington County, deserters made the tax collector cease operations and distribute what he had on hand to their families. Deserters raided the quartermaster depot in Perry County and destroyed the stores there. Under the circumstances, Hamilton could no longer continue tax collections in that region.

The Confederate Civil War was one of class warfare: 

Though their motives were not always the same, the one thing nearly all armed resisters had in common was that they were men of modest means. In eastern Tennessee, for example, Unionist guerillas were mainly small farmers, artisans, and laborers. By contrast, their pro-Confederate counterparts held three times as much real estate and twice as much personal property. 

What a surprise.  Mr. Williams wraps up his paper with a recounting of how slaves rebelled against their master.  Many escaped to fight for the Union while others helped the Union forces as guides as happened in the Vicksburg campaign.  Slave rebellions took place even in Mississippi: 

In Choctaw County, Mississippi, slaves turned the tables on their owner, subjecting him to five hundred lashes.... After Mississippi slaveholder Jim Rankin returned from the army “meaner than before,” as one freedman told it, a slave “sneaked up in the darkness and shot him three times.” Rankin lingered in agony the rest of the night before he died the next morning. “He never knowed who done it,” the freedman recalled. “I was glad they shot him down.

Gee, it's almost as if they learned nothing from the French Revolution or the Revolution in San Domingo.